A broken tulip

The sunlight is clear and golden, the colour of amber maple syrup. It warms tree branches and releases ice on the pavement into puddles. In a few hours the effects of the sun will be reversed. The trees will lose their magic, the puddles will freeze again. With the dark comes the start of the Sabbath.

It’s been a long week in so many ways. At work taking orders at the restaurant with a smile and achy feet; on my knees scrubbing tiles under someone else’s toilets or sticking my head and shoulders into their ovens, choking on the fumes (thinking, without great amusement, of the many folktales of people dying by being shoved into an ovens). Every hour not at work is devoted to hammering Algebraic functions into my brain: numbers and rules, rules and numbers.

There’s sickness, there’s anxiety, there’s death on the news and swirling through the air this week. Canada, the world, the people around me, myself – it’s all falling apart. Anyone else felt it this week?

When Israel left Egypt, they spent a good many years walking in the wilderness before they ever reached the Promised Land. Walking, waiting, learning. They learned about the God who thundered from the mountain, who drew covenants of stone, who called himself steadfastly loyal in love and truth. They learned about Sabbath. God rained bread from heaven daily for them, and on Sabbath nothing came from heaven; they ate what was leftover in their homes.

Everywhere Israel walked, they carried with them a Tabernacle. A beautifully embroidered Tent, rich in Garden of Eden symbolism. They carried it through the wilderness. God promised to meet them there.

It is all so beautiful, but so crazy too. Garden of Eden? Paradise? God? With a homeless people? David sang later, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He sets a table before me in the presence of my enemies…”

I shall not want.

I want. There are swarms of questions in the air, so much. I get tired of it all. There is so little margin left in my life that the idea of God not giving daily bread for a day is hardly relaxing.

Yet the day without is a feast day. It is Sabbath: the day Creation was completed and swarmed with abundance. The Sabbath feast table we join now is set directly in the face of lack, of enemies, of wandering, of waiting, of want. I like this about God; how his goodness laughs in the face of those things that shame us, cripple us. He lets the want sit there, watching as he feeds and loves his children right in the middle of chaos and darkness.

Every evening and every morning in that Tent the priest lit a lamp. The lamp had seven beautiful branches shaped from gold with blossoming almonds. It stood like the Tree of Life, lifting light high. The light from those branches fell onto a golden table nearby. Twelve loaves of bread waited on that table. Bread: think manna, think the twelve tribes of Israel, think humans, think us.

Every Sabbath, the bread is replaced.

God provides bread faithfully in the desert and we are the bread in His presence; God gifts to the earth and we ourselves are the earth’s gift back to God.

The Sabbath was created for us, said the Teacher, not man for the Sabbath

and the Sabbath longs for us, says theologian Heschel, longs for us like a bride about to start wedding celebrations

and we are called, always, always into this six-day journey of creation out of chaos, of longing for completion –

a completion whose blessed coming we are reminded of as we rest, as we stop, every week, just like the bread is replaced

we are literally renewed — remade — for another week.

This is not simply a nice idea; it is more real than winter sunshine and ice. If you believe in Jesus and eat his body in holy Communion you know how this enters your body, rebuilding you new every week. You know about this: you are joined to his flesh and he is joined to you in holy covenant, his creation power restoring you to life, your body and life an offering back to him. Like the showbread in the Tent, the gift goes both ways.

Every week, we are  

remade.

So much seems to change from the six-day cycle of increasing crustiness

to the rest, the satisfaction of completion, of new life and goodness on Sabbath.

Two things do not: the loaves, whatever their state, are sprinkled with sweet smelling frankincense. The lamp is lit daily, evening and morning.

Two things do not change: our prayers and our praise, rising to God, and the warmth of His presence, His life, so close to us, bathing us like the maple syrup sunshine lingering outside now, no matter where we are in the six-day journey, no matter how close we are to falling apart, to drying out, or being brand new and refreshed.

This is the gift longing for you in just a few hours; to join heaven and earth in the rest God has established.

To stop, to rest, to feast, to Sabbath.